Site Mobile Navigation

For Better, for Worse, for Richer, for Pasta

MARCELLA HAZAN took a labored walk from her custom-built kitchen to a living room chair, an artichoke as big as a baby’s head tucked under her good arm.

She’s 84 now, and a parade of Marlboro Lights and afternoon shots of Gentleman Jack whiskey have added up. She has recently endured an infected foot, circulation problems and the other ailments that come in endless waves after a certain age.

And if that wasn’t enough, the woman who taught American home cooks the right way to make Italian food endures the indignities of her local supermarket, which sells jarred bruschetta topping, inflatable alligator beach toys and artichokes so big they offend her.

“I never saw artichokes in my life like this,” she said. “It’s better because it’s bigger? What am I supposed to do with this?”

What she does is instruct her assistant — “my last student,” she calls her — to pare down the monstrosities and brown them well to coax out more flavor. The vegetable goes into a baking dish with shrimp and slices of fresh mozzarella moistened with olive oil and butter.

Ms. Hazan and her husband, Victor, first tasted the dish at a restaurant in Rome. She recreated the unusual combination of shellfish and cheese, and handed her detailed notes — in Italian, of course — to him.

He translated them into a workable English-language recipe and added an elegant little headnote. The result was published a decade ago in “Marcella Cucina,” the fifth of her six cookbooks.

That her husband has written every word of English in Ms. Hazan’s books is the worst kept secret in cooking. And now he has created the ultimate translation: her memoir, written by him in her voice. After 53 years of marriage, watching countless classes and handling hundreds of Ms. Hazan’s recipes, he said, her voice flows through his fingertips as naturally as his own.

Photo

HER VOICE, HIS WORDS Marcella and Victor Hazan have 53 years of marriage, a shared love of Italian food and now, a memoir.Credit
Melissa Lyttle for The New York Times

“Her gift is the mystery of creation,” he explained. “My gift is the ability to remember taste and the talk at the table about food, and to capture it in words.”

The book began on a small desk in the couple’s bedroom, where Ms. Hazan wrote out on a legal pad what she could recall of her life. It took about six months.

She handed it to Mr. Hazan, who spent another 18 months at the computer on his glass desk in an office filled with art from their travels.

“Amarcord: Marcella Remembers” (Gotham Books, October 2008) offers for the first time a public glimpse into the professional and romantic relationship between a science teacher from a small Italian town in Emilia-Romagna and the Italy-loving son of Jewish New York furriers. It is a marriage that shaped how Italian cooking came to be defined in the United States.

“They brought Italy beyond red sauce to America,” said Tina Ujlaki, executive food editor of Food & Wine magazine. A longtime fan, she edited the Hazans’ copy for years, until they parted on a sour note in 1999. The battles, she said, had become too strenuous. Other editors reported similar difficulties.

Several pages in the book are devoted to the Hazans’ bitter breakup with Judith Jones, the noted cookbook editor for Knopf. At the end, Ms. Hazan was crying in a restaurant, begging to be let out of her contract because Ms. Jones and the publisher treated “The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking” so poorly. They questioned Ms. Jones’s ability in the kitchen and thus her qualifications to suggest recipe changes.

Ms. Jones, in interviews and in her own recent memoir, said Ms. Hazan had ruined her palate with cigarettes and bourbon, and that the couple were terribly difficult to work with.

She is perhaps the most prominent name on a list of people who have had challenging working relationships with the Hazans. And although the pair have developed tens of thousands of fans in several countries, their circle of good friends is tight.

Photo

A SOFT HEART Marcella Hazan in her kitchen in Longboat Key, Fla. Her home cooking led to six cookbooks.Credit
Melissa Lyttle for The New York Times

“I never had a sense they had a huge number of friends,” Ms. Ujlaki said. “I think they’re very wound up in each other as a couple.”

In a few weeks, the Hazans will travel from their comfortable condominium on a powdery stretch of beach on Florida’s west coast to the Northeast for a short book tour.

Mr. Hazan is certainly up for it, and for more. He’s almost 80, but works out with a personal trainer five days a week. He still dresses like a European dandy, a ladies’ man in sharp linen pants and monogrammed shirts undone enough to offer a peek at his chest.

Ms. Hazan, who likes a good afternoon nap and soft shoes, is happy to visit New York but is not looking forward to the actual travel.

Her memoir begins boldly with the tale of her right arm, which is undersize and bent. Her hand, as the book describes it, is claw-like. She broke it in a fall on a beach in Egypt when she was 7. A series of botched surgeries in Italy left it deformed but still useful enough to hold a knife. Because of it, she would cringe when she saw herself on television.

Ms. Hazan, then Marcella Polini, had earned doctorates in the natural sciences and biology. She was teaching math and science at a teachers’ college several miles south of her hometown, Cesenatico, when she met Mr. Hazan. He was an erudite college dropout whose father ran a fur business in New York that his son would later have to rescue.

Mr. Hazan had been born in Cesena, a nearby Italian town, but his parents, Sephardic Jews, moved him to New York as a child. He had come back to Italy in his 20s to reconnect with his roots, to eat and to write.

In the book, which takes its title from a word in her regional dialect meaning “I remember,” Ms. Hazan describes him as persuasive, pushy and sure of himself. But she was slowly enchanted. They married and she dutifully followed him back and forth across the Atlantic as he struggled between his father’s fur business and his own wanderlust.

Photo

SHE REMEMBERS Marcella Polini at age 6, in a photo from her memoir.

In 1967, Mr. Hazan was called upon to return home to help with the ailing business. In the 1970s, it became tangled in a tax evasion mess. He left the business in 1978, when the cooking schools took off.

In New York, Ms. Hazan gagged at ketchup, found American coffee like dishwater and stumbled over English. She hadn’t spent much time in the kitchen, so learning to cook for her husband was a frustrating pursuit. She eventually turned to a cookbook written by Ada Boni, a fellow Emilia-Romagna native. That was the key.

“Cooking came to me as though it had been there all along, waiting to be expressed; it came as words come to a child when it is time for her to speak,” she writes.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

In 1969, she signed up for a Chinese cooking class with Grace Chu, who canceled after one session. Her classmates decided they wanted to learn Italian cooking with Ms. Hazan instead. Her husband, sensing an opportunity, encouraged it.

“He said: ‘You like to teach, you like to cook. Put the two things together and stop complaining,’ ” she said.

A year later, Craig Claiborne, the food editor at The New York Times, came to a lunch at their apartment on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 55th Street. That meal, Roman-style artichokes and tortellini stuffed with ricotta and Swiss chard, rolled veal and a shaved raw fennel salad, was perhaps the most important one of their lives.

With sudden fame, they went on to open cooking schools in Bologna, Venice and New York. Mr. Hazan organized the classes and field trips, acting as much tour guide as producer. He became a wine expert in his own right, and published two books.

But always, he knew Ms. Hazan was the talent. He still talks about her as if she is Tiger Woods. Asked if she deserved her reputation as a stern and sometimes downright mean teacher, he is dismissive. The problem was ill-behaved students who asked silly questions.

Photo

Marcella Polini with her future husband, Victor Hazan, in Cesenatico, Italy, in 1952.

Ms. Hazan explained, “What can I do? If you are frying something and just in a second or two you have to turn it and someone says, ‘When you cut your meat why do you hold your knife in that way?’ I’m sorry. I can’t tell you.”

They both agreed her job was to teach, not to entertain. But it seems they did not agree on much more, according to friends and the book.

They write about battles over moving, recipes and apartment renovations, including one in Venice that left “deep wounds.” People who have spent time with them talk about a near-constant level of contradiction.

But in person, especially this late in the relationship, they are sweet with each other even when they don’t agree. No, he tells this visitor, she will not demonstrate how to peel the artichokes. She brushes him aside and takes up the knife. When people manage to find their phone number and ask to stop by with a book to autograph, he instructs them to leave it at the guard stand. She lets them up.

“I am the soft heart,” she said.

People who have worked with the pair have speculated about whether Mr. Hazan’s luckiest day was the one when he met his wife-to-be, or if it was the other way around.

“My impression is that she never really wanted to do this,” said Arthur Schwartz, the Brooklyn-based cookbook author and expert on Jewish and Italian food, who worked with the Hazans in Italy. “All she wanted to do was keep herself busy in the apartment. She liked to cook and he liked to be Italian and come home for lunch. So they found a way to make money doing it.”

To say he was exploiting her is cynical, said Dorothy Kalins, the magazine editor who helped found Saveur and edited Newsweek. She has written about and cooked with the Hazans since the early 1990s.

The relationship, she said, is very complex but golden.

“It’s very clear that she cooked to please Victor and she still cooks to please Victor, and Victor is extremely exacting,” she said. “But she matched his demands with her erudition. Her rigor matched his exactitude.”

Perhaps the person with the best seat in the house is their son, Giuliano, 49, who lives nearby in Sarasota and teaches cooking in the United States and Italy. He has given them two grandchildren, although like grandparents everywhere they complain that they don’t see them enough.

He says he has inherited his mother’s spontaneity and his father’s hyper-tuned sense of organization, traits that the couple admired in each other from the start.

Without him, she wouldn’t have gotten into cooking. Without her, he would not have been able to dive so deeply into the world of food and wine, their son said. “I think they both found something in the other that completed them,” he said. “I never thought that one sort of lucked out more than the other.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page F1 of the New York edition with the headline: For Better, for Worse, for Richer, for Pasta. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe